Gallus woke up—someone was puking their guts out downstairs. His mandated week off of guard duty was starting on a terribly sour note.
His home was a castle suite that was two stories high and decorated with twenty too many (but rare and expensive) antique hippogriff vases depicting old stories in pictograms that he barely understood. He flew down to the living room and found no one, and when he turned to look into the kitchen he found Ocellus.
She was hunched over the sink. She smiled at him in greeting, waving a dainty hoof before her smile twisted and she unleashed hell into the stainless steel basin.
Gallus waited for her on his couch. Part of him wanted to go pour a glass of wine but he was a little too lazy for that. He watched as Ocellus cleaned herself up, poured herself some water and walked over to the living room, sitting in the loveseat adjacent to him.
For a moment they didn’t say a word. Ocellus drank her water and Gallus was just plain happy to see her, to look at her and know that she was here, beside him. She looked the same as she always had, ever since she became the Royal Changeling Engineer; her limbs were longer than they were in school, and her horn was, too, and split at the end, like the handle of a dowsing rod. She looked scary and beautiful at the same time, like a weird bug that one would find in some cave near Somnambula that no one had ever heard of. He hadn’t seen her in almost a year now, and the last time they talked, it was barely for a few hours.
“If you woke me up in the early morning for no good reason,” Gallus said, “I’m probably going to kill you.”
“I have diplomatic immunity,” Ocellus said. She took another gulp of water, finishing off her glass. “Twilight would throw you in jail.”
“She could try,” Gallus grunted. “What do you want?”
“I wanna show you something.”
“And this couldn’t wait until normal daytime hours because…?”
“I’m excited to show it to you!”
Gallus shook his head. “I’m going back to bed.”
“What’s the worst thing about Hearth’s Warming? Any winter holiday?”
“Depends what you’re doing. Honestly it’s probably all the mead you feel obligated to drink at dinner,” he said. He stepped off of the couch. “G’night, Celly.”
“It’s the creatures you spend it with!” Ocellus said. She followed him up the stairs, and sat on the end of his bed as he crawled into it, tucked himself in. “Think about it. No matter who you ask, everycreature has an awkward, sad, angry, emotion-to-never-be-discussed-out-loud memory about Hearth’s Warming and it’s always, always because of something that happened because of someone else!”
“I spent the first seventeen Blue Moon Festivals of my life alone. That was pretty miserable.” Gallus nestled into his pillow, closed his eyes. He could feel with his legs that Ocellus was crouching, putting her chest to the surface of the bed and raising her butt in the air, getting ready to pounce on him. “If you try to do anything to keep me awake, I’m definitely gonna kill you.”
Ocellus sighed. Gallus felt her settle onto her belly. “The memories that really, really, really hurt,” she continued, “are the ones involving someone you love—the ones where something went completely wrong.”
“Sure.”
“And I have something that fixes that!”
“Sure.”
“You wanna see?”
“No.”
“We’ve been developing it for a while now. I think the first iteration of TearBreaker was perfected around the time Sandbar and Yona got married, three years ago.”
“Please don’t remind me of that,” Gallus said. “I can still feel the hangover from the morning after. I think part of my brain died with their matrimony.”
“Same!” Ocellus said. “Now get up. We’re going to the hive.”
“No we’re not.”
“Aren’t you the least bit curious?” she asked. “Just hear me out. Everyone’s universal advice for Hearth’s Warming, at least when it comes to awkward get-togethers, is to just try and grit your teeth and get through it so you can come home and relax for an entire year before you do it all over again. And maybe also drink as much eggnog as you can. Am I wrong?”
“No.” Gallus opened his eyes. He glanced at her.
Ocellus smiled at him. “Well, imagine if nobuggy needed to do that anymore—”
“If you say ‘nobuggy’ ever again I’m banning you from my apartment.”
“Imagine if you didn’t need to grit your teeth and bear it. Imagine if feeling all of that pain was, like, a totally doable thing. If it was easy. No stress required. Because it wasn’t even pain in the same way it was pain before. It was just a state of mind. Something that you knew was temporary. Something you were at peace with.”
Gallus squinted. “Did you guys develop another party drug?”
“No! Something better,” Ocellus said. She inched forward and tapped out a little drumbeat on Gallus’s thighs, stopping only after he kicked her hooves away. “Therapy!” she said. “We’ve invented, like, the greatest form of therapy to ever come to pony, dragon, hippogriff, kirinkind! And everyone else except the yaks!”
“The yaks?” Gallus asked.
“They have their secrets.”
Gallus scoffed. He moved to the other side of the bed, feeling Ocellus’s eyes on him the entire time.
He tried to sleep. Again. Ocellus knew how to let herself out, so she didn’t need his help.
But a question remained on his mind, scratching at the inside of his skull like a pet trying to get outside to use the bathroom. And it spurred him to sit up, yet again, and turn to look her in her stupid looking, heartfelt, patient bug eyes.
“Why did you puke in my sink earlier?” he asked.
“I flew here. Really fast. I turned into Professor Rainbow Dash, actually. Ex-professor. I broke the sound barrier, can you believe it? It was crazy! And it really hurt. I don’t know how she does it.”
“And...why did you do all that?”
“Because I was excited to take you to TearBreaker.”
“You need to come up with a better name than that,” he said. After a moment, he nodded. “Fine. Fine. Let’s go.”
“Yay!”
“We’re not flying there, right? I can’t turn into a freak of nature at the drop of a hat.”
“We’re taking the train, silly! You have a full week of vacation. It should only be—”
“I remember the time it takes to go on a trip from here to the Hive and back, Celly. Can I pack a bag?”
“No.”
“Can I make some breakfast?”
“Absolutely.”
Gallus smirked. “That was a trick question. My fridge is empty. Let’s go to Hayburger before we get to the station.”
The duo had a nice train ride; the walk to the Hive was even better, and up until the moment Ocellus led Gallus to the grand doors leading to her lab, he was having a great time hanging out with one of his five best friends in the whole world. But now he only felt a strange sense of fear. The Hive looked as innocuous as it had the last time he saw it—mossy overgrowth spread over the elegant basalt stone tunnels that flowed like a river, opening up into unlabelled rooms that would feel monotonous were it not for the hum of the excited changelings all around him, all excited for something that he wanted to ask about but never did, and now completely regretted keeping quiet on. There was something behind the doors that stood before him and Ocellus. He could feel it. There was something...large, waiting.
Ocellus raised an eyebrow at him. Her hoof, just about to push a door open, stilled itself. “You okay?”
“How many changelings were in your command, again?”
“However many decide to show up to work on any given day,” she said. “Jobs kind of just, sort themselves out day by day here.”
“Right,” he said. Thorax tried his best to get rid of the whole caste system that was in place during their whole villain phase. It was a sociological wonder how the changelings governed themselves. “I don’t know. I feel weird. There’s something off about the vibe in this place.”
“We get that a lot,” Ocellus said. She opened the doors.
There was no one in the lab. It also didn’t really look like a lab. Not the kind of lab that Princess Twilight was fond of.
This lab looked more like a dining hall. One of those old, but fancy ones that you would find in some old geezer’s castle ruins in Griffonstone. It was narrow, and on top of stone counters that lined the walls were a myriad of different scientific tools, vials full of any color Gallus could name, and books, a book for every few centimetres of space that there was. But what set it apart from any lab Gallus had seen was what lay in the middle. There was a table, a long one nearly as long as the room. It was the kind of table that was meant to sit an entire family across generations. An entire hive. And right now, with no one sitting at it, it looked lonely.
Ocellus led him into the lab. He took a seat at the weird cafeteria table as she fluttered over to one of the counters. She fiddled with a scientific apparatus that Gallus didn’t really know the name of, but felt like it could kill him if he tried to mess with it without supervision.
“The hive looks the same,” Gallus said.
“Yeah, we’ve been talking about painting it pink. Like, everything, just, pink. But Kevin keeps trying to veto it.”
“It’s always Kevin, isn’t it?” Gallus rolled his eyes. “But no, I’m surprised. There’s barely been any changes since I was here last.”
“Here last,” Ocellus repeated, still meddling with her sciencey stuff. “That was, what, four years ago? Five?”
“Must be,” Gallus said.
“Mmm,” Ocellus hummed.
“So, where is it?” he asked. At this point he kind of wanted to get everything over with so he could hit the nearest bar. He was craving something strong and fun-inducing. “You made this thing,” he said ‘thing’ so he didn’t need to say TearBreaker, which was a stupid name, “and the way you talk about it sounds like a weird machine, like Twilight’s portal to the mirror world, but you also say it’s therapy, which is really confusing.”
“It’s…” Ocellus stopped fiddling with her strange apparatus for a second. “You can say it’s a machine. It’s more like a creature. A singular whole, living and breathing, that can transform into whatever you like. It just needs access to your most painful memories.”
“What?” Gallus asked. There was a noise, a skittering of what must have been hundreds of hooves, but only for a second. His wings spread out and his feathers ruffled, his neck fanning out like a blooming flower. “What?” he asked again, but he wasn’t sure if he was asking Ocellus to repeat herself or asking what the noise was. He supposed he was doing both.
“Hold on,” said Ocellus. “Everyone else is coming.”
“What?”
The doors opened, and through them flew dozens and dozens of changelings, all flying, their thin wings flapping so fast, so close together that there was a loud, audible buzz that Gallus could feel on his coat. It was like a horde of giant wasps was flying towards him.
He heard voices chattering to each other about how they were excited for something, voices directly addressing him with a “Hi Gallus!” and the like, voices grumbling about wanting to get this over with already. Inch by inch the spots at the long table he was sitting at were taken by changelings, chromatic in hue and all with a singular purpose, as far as Gallus could tell: to participate in whatever Ocellus was about to make him do.
“Hey, Gallus.”
He turned to see Thorax sitting beside him with a nervous grin on his face.
“King.” Gallus nodded respectfully. “Wanna let me know what’s going on?”
“Oh, I can’t really say anything about that,” Thorax said. He reached up behind his head and scritched. “Mostly because Ocellus made me promise not to fill you in as soon as I could. And she’ll get mad at me if I break that promise.”
“On the other hoof, I really couldn’t care less,” said Pharynx, peeking out from behind Thorax. He shot Gallus a grin. “But it’s funnier if you don’t know what’s going on.”
Gallus rolled his eyes. He turned towards where he last saw Ocellus, but she wasn’t there any longer.
A mug slammed onto the table in front of him.
“Fu—ahg!” Gallus screeched, drawing his talons in. His wings shot out from his sides, knocking the drone on his left to the floor and giving a nice punch to the royal on his right. A giggle made Gallus look up: Ocellus was hovering above him, smiling wide.
Gallus could see her fangs, and she hated showing her fangs. If whatever was going on had enough pure, unhinged, malicious energy to make Ocellus show him her fangs, he was definitely in some kind of trouble.
“Drink up,” she purred.
Gallus looked at the mug in front of him. It was a big one, Apple family branded, which meant that it could hold twice as much cider as was a standard drink under the Equestrian Health Association.
The mug was filled with blood.
“Who—”
“It’s mostly yours,” said Ocellus, landing on the table. She sat in front of the mug and pushed it closer to him. “I collected it a few years ago after you passed out at Yona and Sandbar’s wedding. Figured it would have use. And it did.”
Gallus stared at the mug. In the light he saw his warped reflection in his blood, and beside it was a fragment of Pharynx smirking.
“Is this a prank?” Gallus asked.
“No,” said Ocellus and Pharynx at the same time.
“And what’ll this do?”
“Drink it first.”
“Why?”
“It’s funner,” said Pharynx.
“More fun,” Ocellus corrected.
Gallus pulled the mug closer to him. “You said ‘mostly’ my blood.”
Ocellus cleared her throat. “The rest belongs to—”
“Me,” said Thorax.
“Oh.” Gallus blinked. That was kind of hot. He downed the mug. It was horrid, but he had drunk worse things during his school years. When the last drop was drunk, he pushed it back towards Ocellus and raised an eyebrow. “Explain yourself.”
“It lets you experience something that changelings have done for each other every Hearth’s Warming for a few years now. See, we can willingly share our memories with each other, and what TearBreaker does is that it lets non-changelings do that too. I’ll explain the rest when it starts to happen.”
Gallus sighed. “Tricking me into sharing my memories is a violation of my privacy. You’re lucky I really don’t care.”
“No I’m not,” Ocellus said. “You think I’d have gone through with making you drink that uninformed if I didn’t know you’d be okay with it?”
He rolled his eyes. “Okay, so what now?”
“We wait!”
“For—”
“For now,” Ocellus said, sleepily. Her eyes glazed over, and she blinked slow. “We’re experiencing it. All of us.”
It was then that Gallus realized the rest of the changeling drones in the room had stopped talking. Even Thorax and Pharynx were now idle. They hunched over the table, eyes half-lidded.
“Celly,” Gallus said, voice rising in volume, quaking. “This is kinda freaking me out.”
“Ssssorry,” Ocellus slurred. It was like she was fighting off a melatonin tablet. “‘Kay, we need..verbal consent to initiate the TearBreaker protocol.”
“Will it be better than being in a room full of silent changelings?”
“It, we, um, we recreate a very specific Hearth’s...Hearth’s Warming, from your memory,” Ocellus said, taking slow breaths. “Innovative form of...exposure therapy.”
“That only raises more questions,” Gallus said. “But fine. Just stop with the sleepy crowd of changelings. It’s making me claustrophobic.”
“Thanks, Gallus,” said Ocellus. She blinked one eye, then the other. “It’ll be okay...soon.”
Gallus opened his mouth to respond.
The world erupted in a burst of cyan.
Gallus was sitting in the Map Room of Twilight’s old castle. Every inanimate object, from the table to his chair to chairs around him, the ceilings and the pillars holding up the wall, and the walls and various segments of the ground, every single one of them had a pair of eyes. Then the eyes closed.
“Okay. This is weird,” Gallus said. He waited for a response. He got none.
Gallus stepped off of his chair. For a second he thought he could feel the floor fidget, like he was standing on top of someone, but as soon as the thought passed his mind, the floor simply felt like a normal floor. He took another step, hesitantly, but nothing came of it this time, so he walked out of the room.
It was Hearth’s Warming. The tinsel and the ornaments adoring the crystal walls made that clear. But when was this?
The sound of distant caroling drifted by him. Where there was singing, there were ponies. He followed the sound, rounding the corner only to run into a lone Ocellus standing in the middle of the hall, shifting her weight from one side to the other constantly.
“Hi,” said Gallus.
“Hey,” said Ocellus.
Gallus looked around: the castle was exactly as he remembered it, but there was something off about it, too. It was too familiar. Too tailored. “Explain,” he said simply.
Ocellus nodded, she turned and began to walk, and before Gallus could ask where she was going, she was talking, and he knew that his only option here was to follow her. “We’re currently remaking your most painful Hearth’s Warming memory!” she chirped. “The idea is that by reliving it, you’re going to make peace with it, and you’re also going to remember it forever so that no other Hearth’s Warming comes off quite as bad as this particular one. The psychology sounds dumb out loud, but we have a 75% success rate.”
“Remaking,” Gallus repeated. “What do you mean by that?”
“We’ve transformed into the building and the creatures in the building. The Hive itself reacts to and automatically accommodates the size of the creatures inside of it, so there’s no chance of us being crushed within a tunnel or anything. ”
“What, like, we’re stepping on your engineering team right now?”
“My underlings are actually making up the ceiling of the castle,” said Ocellus. “But yes, we’re currently walking on changelings.”
Something grabbed at Gallus’s back paw and it squeezed.
Gallus yelped, taking off into the air. He looked down at the floor, but could see nothing off about it.
“This is insane!” he cried. “Y-you can’t just turn into an entire place like that! How am I gonna feel safe ever again? What if all of Canterlot is just another hive of changelings?”
“You know, all things considered, you’re taking this incredibly well,” said Ocellus. “I let Prince Shining Armor go through the first prototype and he needed, well, actual therapy for a few months afterwards.”
“I lived in Ponyville for the most memorable parts of my youth.” He stayed in the air, flapping just enough to stay in place.
“And yet you still have the audacity to call anything insane,” Ocellus said. “Come on. You’re supposed to be over in the...living room? This castle has four living rooms. Your memory’s in the one we’re about to walk into.”
“So which of my divorces is this?” Gallus asked. “The one with Sandbar? Silverstream? Yona? All of them? I mean, those were all pretty chill and we're all friends now, but getting divorced three Hearth's Warmings in a row is the only thing I can think of that would top those years in Griffonstone when I was freezing or starving or both.”
Ocellus stopped cold. She turned to Gallus, mouth open. “You don’t know what this is?”
Gallus crossed his arms. “It’s not any of the divorces?”
“You’re serious?”
“Stop answering my questions with questions.”
“Over here,” said Ocellus. She walked to a door bordered by tinsel and sprinkles. From behind it, Gallus could hear laughter. She looked back at him, stepped aside.
“Not gonna open the door for me?” Gallus asked.
“I’m just a guide,” said Ocellus. “I’m supposed to give you nudges, but you’re the one who makes the choices. That’s how this all works.”
Gallus rolled his eyes. He flapped hard, propelling himself backwards, before he dove, shooting straight for the door.
He crashed through it with a bang, tumbling through the air until he saw a glimpse of a pillar, and he spread his wings wide, coming to a stop just before his beak made contact with its cold surface. He let himself fall to the ground. His heart was racing.
“Nice one,” came a scratchy voice. Gallus craned his neck to the side.
Smolder hung over the back of a four-pony couch. Beside her was Sandbar, and beside him was Ocellus. Another Ocellus; a fake one. All three of them wore smug expressions that could put Discord to shame. Just behind them, Gallus could see Silverstream on her side, on top of a prone Yona, who was looking over at him curiously.
“Shut up,” said Gallus. “Shut up. You’re not all changelings, are you? Where’s Twilight?”
“Former-Headmare Twilight,” corrected fake Ocellus. “Or Princess, if you want to be formal.”
“You okay, Gally?” Sandbar asked. He looked like a worried puppy. “We’ve been waiting for you for a while.”
“It was barely even fifteen minutes,” said Smolder. She reached over to boop Sandbar’s nose. “But he has a point—” She looked now at Gallus. “Where were you? I thought we were all gonna meet at Sugarcube Corner for milkshakes.”
“What…” Gallus squinted. “None of you answered my question. Where’s Twilight? When is this?”
“She’s gone on vacation, remember?” Smolder asked. “What’s your damage? Sit down. Relax.”
“Okay, cool, but tell me what we’re doing here,” said Gallus. “I think I know, but remind me.”
Smolder shared a glance with Sandbar and fake Ocellus momentarily. “Uh, Gallus, we’re sneaking into the castle, remember? Starlight and Twilight are gone. So is Spike. This place was begging for a Hearth’s Warming party. Staycation in Ponyville. The Treehouse got boring. Any of this ringing a bell?”
Gallus shook his head.
“You got memory loss or something?”
“That’s not why I’m shaking my head!” Gallus said. “This...can’t be right!”
“Uh,” Smolder stammered. “Celly, what’s up with him?”
“Nothing,” fake Ocellus said. “I think he flew a little too fast on the way here.”
Gallus turned to the real Ocellus, who was still watching quietly from the doorway, expression enigmatic. “Tell me again what this is supposed to be?” he asked. “Because it sure as Tartarus isn’t my worst memory! Are you serious? Did you not test this thing before you made me drink that blood? This is...” He went quiet for a moment. “I’m pretty sure this is the best Hearth’s Warming Eve I’ve ever had!”
“The serum works, it has worked on at least a dozen other non-changelings since we’ve developed it and it’s been pitch perfect every time,” she said. Her voice was struggling in a tone that Gallus knew well—she was being tugged between her need to get all objective and nerdy about everything, and her sensitivity towards his anger. “I’m not willing to accept that this isn’t your most painful memory of Hearth’s Warming Eve.”
Gallus bristled. “Did you not hear—”
“Gallus, if this is the best Hearth’s Warming you’ve had, why aren’t you happy to see it?”
Gallus stopped. He sat. He looked away from her, back to his friends, who seemed like they were frozen in time. Their expressions were still, their chests not rising or falling.
“I am,” he said. Then to make sure that she knew he meant it he said, “I am. I just don’t like being told that one thing is going to happen and getting something else completely different.”
“Or the serum works,” said Ocellus.
“Then what’s so painful about all of this?”
For the first time since she had shown up at Gallus’s apartment, Ocellus looked completely, utterly unsure of herself. “I...don’t know. The serum—okay, fine, I lied. It worked, but it also didn’t. When you drink it, it lets us experience everything from the user’s eyes. Often we end up seeing things and filling in blanks that the user themselves forgot. But there was something off about your memory. It wasn’t even a memory! It was like a dream! It was just—just a series of images and feelings and sensations!”
“So the serum didn’t work,” Gallus deadpanned.
“It did!” Ocellus yelled suddenly. “It has to!”
Gallus leaned away, watching as Ocellus blinked in surprise at herself. For a brief moment they stood silent.
“What happened here?” Ocellus asked. “Do you remember?”
“Do you?” Gallus gestured to the changeling impersonating her on the couch. “You saw the weird memory I have of it, but you were also, you know, there for it.”
Ocellus sighed. “Yes. I do. Kind of. But this was nothing but a good evening. A fun one.” She looked to the rest of their friends. “I think we lit fireworks in the artifact room.”
“That was during Nightmare Night,” Gallus said. “Wasn’t it?”
He and Ocellus looked to the copies of their friends, still frozen, but now struggling to stay frozen. Ocellus called out, “Do you guys remember anything more than we do? Something I might have missed?”
“Nope!” Sandbar said.
Smolder shrugged, and so did Fake Ocellus, but behind them, Silverstream put her hand up. “I know! I know I know I know—”
“Silverstream is excitable and adorable.” Gallus said. “Not a twelve-year-old.”
Silverstream blew a raspberry at him.
“A little better,” he admitted. “Now what do you remember?”
“You—we—we played Uno.”
“That’s it?” Gallus asked.
“Uno all night. All day. For three days.”
“Hippogriff wrong!” Yona called from under Silverstream. “Partly. Second half of night was spent smashing things.”
Gallus smoothed back his headfeathers. “I can’t tell if you’re being true to character or telling the truth.”
“Both,” said Yona.
Beside him, Ocellus started talking to herself, which meant that a hypothesis was on the way. He waited, catching the occasional word in her murmuring but never fully comprehending until—
“I’ve got it!” she cried, fluttering into the air. “Okay, so we snuck into the castle and then we cracked open a few ciders, and a few with Yona always means a few dozen, and then we remembered that time we lit fireworks in the artifact room for Nightmare Night so we did that again, and then we started smashing the empty glass artifact cases in the supply closet, sweeped all of that up, and we played Uno and told stories until it was time to go to Sugarcube Corner for dinner. That all sound familiar?”
“I think you hit all the major beats,” Gallus said. He tried to think; there were a few other things missing, but they only came to him in vague notions. Laughter here, a meaningful look there, all of it was good, but all of it was so far away, so distant that he couldn’t help but wonder if any of it had happened at all. Maybe this specific Hearth’s Warming was a dream. Maybe all of them had been.
No matter what, though… “Nothing bad happened,” Gallus said. He looked to Ocellus. “Nothing bad happened.”
Ocellus groaned. “So, what? We’re back where we left off. TearBreaker didn’t work on you.”
“I think it did,” said Gallus.
“What do you mean?”
Gallus looked back to their friends, and was thankful to find that they hadn’t frozen up, like before. They were simply watching. They looked so alive, and real, and happy. He knew that they were just changelings, but they had managed to capture everything he loved about them; how Yona looked serene and impatient at the same time, always, and how Silverstream’s wings fluttered on occasion, ready to bolt towards the nearest thing capable of receiving her adoration on a moment’s notice, how Smolder and Sandbar spoke to each other with naught but the occasional glance.
“It hasn’t been like this in a while,” Gallus said. “We haven’t spent Hearth’s Warming together in a few years, and that’s sad. That’s a ton more painful than any fight. It’s like we just grew too old for this. Sneaking into Twilight’s old castle and stealing her artifacts, going to Sugarcube Corner at two in the morning…it’s exactly as my memories remember everything. I know we did all of this, I know we had fun, but it’s so far away now that I can’t see it clearly. Like the view of Mount Aris from the Dragonlands coast.”
He turned to Ocellus, ready to make a crack about how he was glad it wasn’t one of his three divorces, but Ocellus was crying. His smile dropped, and he leapt over to her. He wrapped a wing around her shoulders as she leaned into him, weeping softly. From the corner of his eye he could see the changelings imitating their friends grow worried.
“Celly?” he whispered to her quietly, trying to maintain mirth in his voice. “Why are you crying? This is supposed to be the end of my character arc. Aren’t we here for me?”
“Of course not,” Ocellus sobbed. “We’re here for me. Don’t you see that I miss you? Couldn’t it just have been a fight that we all had that I don’t remember? How am I supposed to fix—fix time! How am I supposed to make this—” She gestured at their friends, who were now coming closer. “happen again?”
“Maybe you can’t,” Gallus said. Ocellus pressed against him harder, her tears coming again. He held her steady.
He wasn’t sure what to say until he remembered that he was actually good at this stuff. He hadn’t seen Ocellus or the others in a while, that was true, but he had a week off, didn’t he? Who was to say that he couldn’t work some magic?
He took one of her hooves into a claw, and he squeezed her harder with his wing. “I’m here now,” he said, “and I really did miss you, and I was having fun until you made me drink Thorax’s blood. How about I stay for the rest of the week?”
Ocellus stilled. She looked up at him, her eyes, sometimes hard to read, showed her surprise clearer than crystal. “You’re serious?”
“You turned into Professor Rainbow and flew all the way to Canterlot for me,” Gallus said. “It’s the least I could do.”
“That’s true,” Ocellus said. She laughed while she spoke, and that made Gallus feel better than any therapy would.
“Maybe we get on a train, crash everyone else’s Hearth’s Warming parties?”
“Maybe,” Ocellus said. “Or maybe we just stay here?”
“That’s cool too,” Gallus said. He squeezed her one last time, and let her go.
Light flashed as the changelings impersonating their friends reverted to their original forms. Ocellus soon found herself underneath a pile of drones, all attempting to hug her.
Gallus suddenly remembered that the castle was all changelings, as well. He took to the air and looked down at the floor, which wobbled and throbbed in his absence. “That’s terrifying! How’s about everyone just becomes a changeling again?”
“I can do that,” Pharynx said. Gallus looked to where his voice came from: purple eyes emerged from the couch.
Light flashed again. This time it came from all around him, and it was blinding.
When Gallus’s ears stopped ringing and he could see basic shapes gain, he was back in the lab. Changelings chattered all around him. He and Ocellus were sharing a seat.
He wrapped a wing around her again. “So, you guys really do that for each other? Recreate memories and stuff?”
“Every Hearth’s Warming, though not usually to such an extent,” said Ocellus.
“Why the dumb name?”
“Because the old changeling word for it is Chloroglorp.”
“TearBreaker doesn’t sound so bad to me, now.”
“I know.”
“Still, this whole thing sounds traumatizing to go through, every single year.”
“It’s not so bad. Don’t you feel better about your most painful Hearth’s warming memory?”
“I guess I do,” Gallus said. “And you? Do you feel better about...about everything?”
“Can we write a letter?” Ocellus asked. “I think I want to get everyone together for next year.”
“That sounds good,” Gallus said. He eased into her for a moment, enjoying the sound of the drones and Pharynx and Thorax all talking, and then he remembered a memory from a while ago. “Remember when we all came over for Hearth’s Warming and Smolder recommended that you guys jump into giant bowls of hot toddys instead of punch? Do you wanna score a couple gallons of booze and go do that?”
“Oh, we actually kept doing that every year. There’s a pool running right now,” Ocellus said. “Race you there?”
“As long as you don’t turn into Rainbow Dash.”
“Then you’ll win!”
“That’s too bad!” Gallus called, taking to the air.
He flew out of the room before he realized something.
“You have no idea where you’re going,” Ocellus said. She was flying too, and she stopped beside him. She smiled. “Let’s fly together? No races?”
“Fine, fine.” Gallus waved her off. “Together.”
And together they stayed.
